Woman Upstairs (Hardcover)

Indie Next List

May 2013The Woman Upstairs, Claire Messud’s chronicle of a year in the life of 37-year old schoolteacher Nora Eldridge, is gorgeous and brutal, tender and fierce. When Skandar and Sirena Shahid (worldly intellectuals from Lebanon and Italy, via Paris) whirl into Nora’s Cambridge neighborhood, she falls into an intense relationship with their family. You know betrayal is imminent, but that doesn’t make the unraveling any less unsettling. Messud’s portrait of a woman’s rage is startlingly refreshing, and her sentences, as always, are perfection. -- Elizabeth Sher, Politics & Prose Books and Coffee Shop, Washington, DC